ABSTRACT
HOW many people in China, I wonder, still remember the name of Sir Jonathan Lockwright ? Perhaps a few of the older generation, on hearing it, will recall the days of their youth and the stories their parents told them of that sinister personage. Opium trader, exploiter of coolie labour, and, if rumour is to be credited, insatiable pursuer of young girls, he was the object in the middle of the last century of more fear and hatred than any other foreigner on the China coast. At last he went too far even by the standards of those times and perpetrated an exploit which made Shanghai too hot for him. He had somehow caught a glimpse of the daughter of a rich merchant and unfortunately for herself the girl was so pretty that he could not put her out of his mind. He set his agents to work to spy out the land, and hearing that the young lady was on the point of being married, he devised a scheme for having his way with her. On the appointed day, as custom prescribed, the bride left her parents’ house in a red sedan chair for the home of her bridegroom. There are various reports of what happened on the way. According to some accounts, the bearers and musicians were bribed by the Englishman. Others insist that they stopped half-way to wet their thirst, and their place was taken by a gang in Lockwright’s pay. What is certain is that the end of the poor child’s journey was not the comfortable Chinese family where she expected to spend the rest of her days, but a grim foreign house, bolted and barred like a fortress, where she found herself in the arms of a figure so monstrous that she must have thought it was a devil from hell, with high protruding nose and deep-set blue eyes, who splayed a great red beard in her face and told her in broken Chinese that she need look no further for a husband.
